Heid in ma hauns
I had great hopes of introducing a few of my gentle readers (and even some less gentle ones) to a little Scots this evening. But a spot of searching of online dictionaries led me to suspect that I had got the word I wanted wrong.
Yesterday saw a scene of great domesticity: a bit of Star Trek on repeat by way of background, a mound of socks before me. It was the day of the Sock Amnesty, when errant socks meet their partners again, and some sense of order is restored in the sock drawers of Him and Her. (On occasion, the event is upgraded to a Sock Cull…you can guess the rest. My mending skills are not always what they could be.)
A friend of mine is particularly swift at matching socks with their pair, and even has a small (I think home made) certificate to prove it. I was positive that what she was doing was ‘flyting’ socks, but when I looked it up, ‘flyte’ mainly seems to mean scold. I guess you could stand over the mound of socks and harrangue them, but it hasn’t worked for me before.
I was then going to put another word as a title to show that I felt a bit stuck at getting the wrong word. So I looked up that one, and it didn’t mean what I wanted either…
It’s all very well having had 25 years as a MacKenzie, Scottish relatives, around half my life living in Scotland…but I don’t really come across as a native when I speak. English mother, most of the rest of my life in England, and I sound it.
The more you stay around here in Scotland, though, the more extra words creep in that don’t get much use down south. (Though ‘minging’ seems to be doing quite well for itself now in the rest of the UK, I see.) Ever the linguistic magpie, I enjoy adding them to occasional, or even everyday, use.
Only difficulty is when I overextend myself, thinking I’ve got it right, authentic even, and it’s not. Though I just tried a different search, and the term ’scunnered’ (or ’scunnert’) turns up as I thought it did, meaning frustrated.
Ahm a wee bit scunnert but ahv no goat ma heid in ma hauns yet. In my next search, I found scunnert as fed up, but I also in turn came across www.urbandictionary.com so I can track down a few more words, Scots and other. Mair anon.
1 comment January 15th, 2008